In April 1938, Albert Einstein stood before three thousand people and said something that made his audience go quiet. He was “afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain — especially from the development of a narrow nationalism.” A Jewish state with borders and an army, he warned, would mean “turning away from the spiritualization of our community, which we owe to the genius of our prophets.”

Einstein was not arguing against a homeland for Jews. He was arguing against what a certain kind of statehood would do to the Jewish soul. He wanted “a reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together” — not because he was naïve, but because he understood that when a spiritual tradition is fused with the machinery of power, the tradition is what gets crushed.

A decade later, he and Hannah Arendt co-signed a letter to the New York Times warning that Menachem Begin’s Freedom Party preached “an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.” Begin’s party would become Likud — the party of Benjamin Netanyahu.

I thought about that letter this week because Israel’s Knesset passed a law imposing the death penalty on those convicted of terrorism against the State of Israel. In the West Bank, for non-citizens tried in military courts, death becomes the default sentence — with severely limited judicial discretion, a 90-day execution mandate, and no right to clemency. As the Israel Democracy Institute noted, the law is unconstitutional, discriminatory — applying de facto only to Palestinians — and contrary to international law. Even the legal framework Israel created for prosecuting Nazis allowed judges greater flexibility.

Many analysts read the law as a populist provocation: bait for the Supreme Court to strike it down, setting up an election fought between politicians and judges. That reading may be tactically correct. But it misses the harder question. For the provocation to work, the public must find it compelling enough to side with the politicians over the court. A death penalty without due process, applied along ethnic lines, must feel not outrageous but righteous. And that tells us something about the society that produced the law — not just the politicians who drafted it.

What it tells us is that a certain worldview has taken hold — one in which belonging to the nation is defined in religious and ethnic terms, and in which those outside that definition are not entitled to the same protections. When a discriminatory law feels like common sense to enough of the electorate, it is because the underlying logic of religious nationalism — that one group holds a moral or divine claim over the land and its future — has already been absorbed. The law is not the disease. It is a symptom.

And it is not uniquely Israeli. It is a global phenomenon, and understanding why it is surging everywhere at once is the only way to understand what is happening in any one place.

After World War II, the democratic world built its institutions on a specific lesson: that claims of ethnic, racial, or religious supremacy lead to catastrophe. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European project, the postcolonial experiments in secular governance — all were, in different ways, answers to the same question: how do we organize diverse societies without one group claiming divine or natural authority over the rest? For decades, the answer was some version of secular democracy — imperfect, contested, but broadly accepted as the least dangerous framework available.

That consensus is now unraveling. Not because religion has suddenly become more powerful, but because secular governance has lost credibility. Scholar Mark Juergensmeyer has documented how religious nationalism emerges precisely in this gap: when people lose faith in modern institutions, they turn to religion as a source of ultimate order. Politics becomes “religionized” — struggles are recast as cosmic battles, and opponents become not merely wrong but existential threats to a divine way of life. The disillusionment is real. The solution offered is dangerous.

In the United States, a study found that states where senators expressed more Christian nationalist sentiments experienced significantly higher rates of violence against religious minorities — a relationship that held even after controlling for partisanship and religiosity. The Christian flags and prayers at the January 6th Capitol insurrection were not accessories; they were the point.

In India, Hindu nationalism under the BJP has systematically constrained civic space for religious minorities. Research by Deo and colleagues shows Muslim, Christian, Sikh, and Buddhist organizations forced into self-censorship, while Hindu organizations enjoy state backing. The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, which excluded Muslims from an accelerated path to citizenship, wrote religious discrimination into law.

In Europe, the pattern repeats with its own variations. The Christian Right — distinct from mainstream Christian Democracy, which helped build postwar liberal institutions — has become a significant political force. In Poland, ultra-conservative organizations helped push through a near-total abortion ban. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has positioned himself as the defender of “Christian Europe.” In Britain, figures like Bishop Ceirion Dewar preach alongside far-right rallies, calling for Christianity to be placed “at the heart of politics”. Across the continent, interdenominational alliances form not around shared theology but shared enemies: immigration, Islam, gender equality, pluralism itself.

What connects these movements across faiths and continents is not God. It is a political architecture: disillusionment with secular order, the framing of political crises in sacred terms, the identification of minorities as civilizational threats, and the expectation of a redemptive confrontation. The theology varies. The playbook does not.

This is why the rise of religious nationalism cannot be separated from the rise of the far right worldwide. They feed each other. The far right provides the grievance and the audience. Religious nationalism provides the moral justification — the sense that what is being done is not merely politically expedient but cosmically ordained. Together, they offer people something that failing institutions do not: certainty.

Einstein saw this coming. Not the specific laws or the specific movements, but the structural danger — the moment when a community’s spiritual tradition stops asking difficult moral questions and starts providing easy political answers. He was right.

The death penalty law may or may not survive Israel’s Supreme Court. But the current that produced it — visible in Jerusalem, in Washington, in New Delhi, in Budapest, in London — will not be struck down by any court. That requires something courts cannot provide: a renewed conviction that no people, no faith, and no nation is above the rights of others. It requires, in other words, exactly the kind of reckoning Einstein called for almost ninety years ago — before anyone was listening.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)